"Identifying factors effecting customers making sustainable clothing purchase decisions a study on Colombo based fashion consumers "

Abstract

The Sri Lankan sustainable fashion market is still at its infancy compared to global initiatives. This may be due to the lack of initiatives taken by the governments towards preserving nature. There are a very few brands who had made the initiate of branding themselves as partially or complete sustainable product offering companies. Hence the traction the brands has towards the market is a niche. Due to the global urgency of the matter the market cannot remain as a niche. Moreover, it should look at ways to improve. Keeping this though as a motivation this study has investigated the main motivational factors that makes a customer invest on a sustainable fashion garment. For which the author has used empirical research to find well researched data. The empirical findings offered six variables contributing to consumer buying decision of a sustainable product and they were marketing, product attributes, social norms, psychological factor, consciousness and habits, experience and lifestyle. Based on the Anderson’s table a sample size of 310 were used, the sample size mentioned was reduced from 389 to 310 due to limited timeframe of the research. For the collection of data, a survey was built using past research work as a base. Email, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp technologies were used to share data. Several statistical methods were used to analyze the obtained data. The methods were Cronbach’s Alpha, KMO, Bartlett’s tests and discriminant validity. These tests ensured the validity and the reliability of the gathered data, further details of the validity of the independent variables and dependent variable are discussed in the chapters to come. Overall, the study reflected that although three variables were statistically proven as most impactful variables on the dependent variable, there were many underlying scenarios that should be put to test to obtain solid outcome. However, the research findings highlighted the fact the a sustainable buying decision is a lot to do with human behavior related factors, skewing more towards consciousness and habits of an individual.